Noticias de Gipuzkoa reports that a recent study by a team of researchers based largely at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, published in the journal Cognition, reveals that native Basque-speaking bilingual people have a more developed capacity to anticipate the words they are reading than their native Spanish-speaking bilingual counterparts.

Linguistic prediction is a basic mechanism of the brain that allows it to relate to the environment around it. In order to speed up communicative processes the brain attempts to anticipate what it will hear or read. According to the study, when reading in Spanish, the native Basque-speakers studied demonstrated a faster brain response, the result of the nature of the Basque language itself, in which the important information when it comes to structuring a sentence comes at the end of the statement.

Chief author Nicola Molinaro concludes that, “Basque speakers have learned to anticipate which words will appear, because they need to do so in order to structure the linguistic material that they have already heard or read … thus they have optimized their predictions and have gotten used to putting them into practice before the age of three, and this mechanism is also activated when they speak or read in another language.”

The findings of the study challenge previous notions that question the ability of people to predict in another language.